Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of Figures -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction -- Geoffrey Dipple and Kat Hill -- Part 1: Redefining Radical Religion in the Reformation -- 1 When Did Denck and Hätzer Cross the Line? -- Defining Heterodoxy in the Early Reformation -- Geoffrey Dipple -- 2 "Worth as Much as Jeremiah and Isaiah" -- Melchior Hoffman and the Prophecies of Lienhard and Ursula Jost -- Christina Moss -- 3 Whirlwinds, Sudden Death, and an Army of Toads -- Baptist Prodigies of the 1660s -- Joshua Caleb Smith -- Part 2: Radical Religion and Social Change in the Reformation -- 4 Monster or Homo Divinus ? -- Thomas Müntzer's Testimony of the First Chapter of the Gospel of Luke -- Christopher Martinuzzi -- 5 The Sword in the Ragged Sheath -- The Motif of the Peasant Radical in Sixteenth-Century Prints -- Jonathan Trayner -- Part 3: On the Boundaries of Sectarianism: Rethinking the Social Location of Anabaptism -- 6 "He or She, Husband or Wife Should Have Escaped the City" -- Dispossession Narratives and Culpability after the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster -- Jessica C. Lowe -- 7 Pragmatic Toleration of Anabaptists in the Electoral Palatinate, 1650-1664 -- Cory D. Davis -- 8 "As Far as the Records Dictate" -- Archival Logics in Anabaptist Source Collections -- David Y. Neufeld -- Index.

The eight essays in this volume approach the study of the Radical Reformation from new perspectives and challenge some of the basic assumptions of the field. Some critique and problematize the typologies developed to distinguish Reformation radicals from each other and from the Magisterial Reformers. Others apply an equally iconoclastic approach to existing scholarship on the relationship between religious change and socio-political radicalism in early modern Europe. A final group concentrate specifically on revising the history of Anabaptism by tracing its long-term development across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and recovering the lives of normal Anabaptists to write a true social history of the movement that avoids relying on the biographies and prescriptive writings of its leadership.

English